Blues Fest records another banner year

Although final attendance numbers for the 21st annual Silver City Blues and Bikes Festival aren’t available yet, both attendees and the Mimbres Region Arts Council, which hosts the event, believe last weekend’s festival was the biggest so far.

“The wrap-up is that when I’m backstage the performers say this is one of their favorite festivals,” said Alex Tager, MRAC’s program director. “The Dirty Dozen Brass Band was amazed by the crowd and how they loved to dance. They love the vibe, they get out to the festival grounds and they say this is a really nice vibe. It’s hard to say how much bigger it was because we don’t have any eyes in the sky.”

Tager said headliner Taj Mahal played for an extra half hour Saturday, and she heard reports all weekend that Gough Park was more packed than ever — including on Sunday, which Tager said seemed to draw more people than any other Sunday in the past.

“We had a solid crowd right until the very end,” she said. “I didn’t get a lot of negative feedback — people thought it was a great festival. People were coming up to me from Tucson, El Paso and saying this is great. It’s a really easygoing, mellow festival, and people appreciate that.”

Official post-festival dances held Friday and Saturday raised money to support the entirely free main event, which takes tens of thousands of dollars to produce each year.

“Keeping it free is a colossal undertaking,” Tager said. “Everyone’s got to jump in because it’s a crazy amount of work.”

Even with the 80 volunteers working on the festival this year, Tager said they can always use more. She particularly thanked “star volunteer of the year” Raul Turrieta. “[He] really went above and beyond.

“[Silver City Public Works and Parks Department Director] Peter Peña and the parks crew … also went above and beyond to make it happen. Their gorgeous grass always takes a hit, with upwards of 10,000 people throughout the weekend, and their hard work is invaluable,” Tager continued.

This year’s raffle was also bigger than ever, with $7,000 worth of prizes — a significant increase, and a marker of how much the festival has grown.

“We had about 17 prizes total, so a lot of locals won — that was really gratifying,” Tager said.

She also said many performers said they would most certainly come back, including motorcycle performance group Busted Knuckle.

Scott Terry, president and chief executive officer of the Silver City Grant County Chamber of Commerce, said although he could not even begin to estimate the money generated by the annual event, it always helps the area’s bottom line and gives the area a good image because it is such a consistent festival.

“The Blues Festival, it does a good job of a couple different things. Number one, it’s so well known throughout this region it gives us a little bit of status of a town that’s being progressive,” he said. “People are always calling and asking about those. We know it attracts an awful lot of people from outside Grant County to come.”

He said that means people are buying things in stores, drinking in the bars and ordering food at restaurants, while also booking the county’s hotels nearly outright for an entire weekend — generating a lot of gross receipts tax money and lodgers’ tax funds.

“It brings dollars outside of Grant County into Grant County, and when they go home they leave their money here. That’s what we want,” Terry said.